ZCash (ZEC) Not Monero (XMR) – Winklevoss Twins say that Regulators are more Comfortable with Zcash

The Winklevoss brothers who are the founders of the US-based Gemini exchange said in a recent podcast interview that the US regulators are more comfortable with Zcash (ZEC) than Monero (XMR).

In a recent episode of the Unchained podcast with Laura Shin the Winklevoss twins discussed various issues ranging from the Bitcoin ETF approval to criticisms on their advertisement campaign. One of the important topics that they discussed in the interview was the process they follow for listing various Crypto assets on their platform.

Gemini currently lists Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and notably ZCash (ZEC). In many ways, Gemini has been more conservative than Coinbase in listing tokens on their platform. Although they have not publicly stated their listing procedure, they give some insights on why they decided to list ZCash and not Monero both of which are privacy based coins.

The Winklevii said that they examine every coin on a case to case basis before deciding to list it on their exchange, they further explain:

“We look at the team, the use case, the proposition of the coin. Is it doing something unique or is it just another me too and is it truly, you know, solving an authentic problem that those are the general common-sense things that we look at and will it pass muster with regulators?”

There is no doubt that Monero is trying to solve the problem of fungibility and privacy, and is credited by many experts in the Crypto space for having great technology behind it. So if Monero meets these requirements then why isn’t it listed?

It has to do with regulatory risks and compliance issues.

“Obviously, we listed Zcash, We didn’t attempt to list Monero and we felt that Zcash was the privacy coin that we could get our regulators comfortable with.”

Monero provides fungibility and privacy as default options unlike ZCash which has privacy enabled and disabled transactions as an option. The privacy-focused approach of Monero makes regulators uncomfortable, to overcome this issue Gemini has only enabled users to transact with unshielded Zcash transactions on their exchange which is not possible with Monero.

Blockmanity recently reported that only 4% of all Monero is mined by Malicious Malware activities which are not a significant number but would make the regulators uncomfortable as they like to have surveillance over where the funds are being used.

Taking Gemini as an example it is unlikely that the regulatory compliant exchanges especially those based in the US to list Monero (XMR) anytime soon.